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An oral history collection on the films of a cult British director, interviewing over 40 people and gathering material from archives around the world.
Advertising has played a central role in shaping the history of modern media. While often identified with American consumerism and the rise of the ‘Information Society’, motion picture advertising has been part of European visual culture since the late nineteenth century. With the global spread of ad agencies, moving image advertisements became a privileged cultural form to make people experience the qualities and uses of branded commodities, to articulate visions of a ‘good life’, and to incite social relationships. Abandoning a conventional delineation of fields by medium, country, or period, this book suggests a lateral view. It charts the audiovisual history of advertising by focussing on objects (products and services), screens (exhibition, programming, physical media), practices (production, marketing), and intermediaries (ad agencies). In this way, the book develops new historical, methodological, and theoretical perspectives.
Runner-Up for BAFTSS Best Edited Collection 2021 Offers analyses of movie magazines originating from the USA, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Chile, South Africa, and more Contributors deal with diversified case studies as Hollywood’s grip on movie magazines, gender in film journalism, typologies of unknown trade press and movie magazine markets, and subversive Tijuana bibles Provides a unique interdisciplinary contribution across fields ranging fro mFilm Studies, Digital Humanities, Periodical Studies, Political Economy, and Cultural History
What barriers limit the encounter between Latin American films and viewers from the continent? Is there a place in Latin America for its own films? What windows open up on television, on private and public digital platforms? What role do alternative spaces and festivals play? What new horizons are cultural policies considering in a scenario of reorganization of the audiovisual field and digital convergence? What methodological challenges do these changing scenarios pose? In the context of the still incipient globalization of Latin American productions against the dominance of Hollywood, the book explores the answers based on case studies carried out by fourteen authors from various countries and disciplinary origins, an analytical effort without precedents in the bibliography produced and circulated in Latin America. In 2019, it won the Essay Prize on Cinema in Latin America and the Caribbean, awarded by the Foundation for New Latin American Cinema.
This book documents contemporary practices of pop-up and site-specific cinema exhibition in the UK (with a focus on Scotland), tracing their links with historical forms of non-theatrical exhibition such as public hall cinema and fairground bioscopes. Through archival research, observation and interviews with film exhibitors and programmers, the book explores how exhibitors create ephemeral social spaces, how they negotiate the various uses and configurations of films and venues, and how they reinvent cinemagoing from its margins.
This volume investigates the relationship between film marketing and sexuality in Italy from the victory of the Christian Democrattic Party at the first elections of the Republican era (1948), to the rise of red-light theaters in the late 1970s. By focusing on the evolution of printed film advertising, this study explores the intersections between the debate on sexuality in this phase of radical transformations of Italian society, and the concurrent process of hypersexualization of Italian media. By combining approaches deriving from cultural studies and media industry studies, the book explores themes such as: the role played by marketing in the film value chain of 1940s-1970s Italy; the intersections between film posters and Italian visual cultures; the relationship that hypersexualized outdoor advertising established with the Italian urban space and its inhabitants; the employment of a sexual imagery in B2B film advertising; the representation of sexualized film advertising in Italian films.
“Territory and memory without borders: New strategies for thinking about the real” edited by ALADOS (Colombian Association of Documentary Makers), Javeriana University and UniMinuto is a selective memory of the first stage of the Seminar Pensar lo Real (2015-2018) the academic space at the International Film Festival in Bogota. The publication has five sections: cartographies of the Ibero-American documentary, documentary dialogues, documentary politics, key aspects to documentary film creation and new ethnographies. Ben Russell, María Luisa Ortega, Jorge La Ferla, Susana de Sousa-Dias, Eryk Rocha and Pablo Mora are some of the authors of this new issue of the collection devoted to documentary: Cuadernos de Alados para Pensar lo Real.
.We know a lot about the directors and stars of Italian cinema's heyday, from Roberto Rossellini to Sophia Loren. But what do we know about the Italian audiences that went to see their films? Based on the AHRC-funded project 'Italian Cinema Audiences 1945-60', Italian Cinema Audiences: Histories and Memories of Cinema-going in Post-war Italy draws upon the rich data collected by the project team (160 video interviews and 1000+ written questionnaires gathered from Italians aged 65 and over; archival material related to cinema distribution, exhibition and programming, box-office figures, and critical discussions of cinema from film journals and popular magazines of the period). For the first time, cinema's role in everyday Italian life, and its affective meaning when remembered by older people, are enriched with industrial analyses of the booming Italian film sector of the period, as well as contextual data from popular and specialized magazines.
Beginning in the 1920s, audiences around the globe were seduced not only by Hollywood films but also by lavish movie theaters that were owned and operated by the major American film companies. These theaters aimed to provide a quintessentially “American” experience. Outfitted with American technology and accoutrements, they allowed local audiences to watch American films in an American-owned cinema in a distinctly American way. In a history that stretches from Buenos Aires and Tokyo to Johannesburg and Cairo, Ross Melnick considers these movie houses as cultural embassies. He examines how the exhibition of Hollywood films became a constant flow of political and consumerist messaging, selling American ideas, products, and power, especially during fractious eras. A truly global account, Hollywood’s Embassies shows how the entanglement of worldwide movie theaters with American empire offers a new way of understanding film history and the history of U.S. soft power.
The question of how audiences form to watch specialised and mainstream films within regional film provision goes to the heart of current debates in audience studies. Online consumption and an increasing array of cultural events mean that the nature and formation of film audiences is changing and that film watching is a diverse and extensive experience. This monograph extends and develops the conceptualisation of audiences as being interactive and relational by introducing three innovative concepts: ‘personal film journeys’, five types of audience formations, and five geographies of film provision within new theorisation of audiences that sees them as a process. The book is significant because it develops new ground-breaking theory and concepts and an innovative methodology based on an extensive dataset derived from empirical research in the under-researched area of regional film audiences.
Italian cinema experienced its peak of domestic and international popularity in the years between the ‘economic miracle’ of the late 1950s and the social and political turmoil of the 1970s. But how did the growing development of the feminist movement in this period impact on Italian film culture? And what role did that film culture play in women’s lives? This book explores the multiple intersections between feminism and Italian cinema from the perspective of women’s everyday lives and relationship with the medium. Drawing from a feminist approach to Gramscian cultural theory, the book builds an archival counter-history of Italian cinema in which women took part as movie-goers, activists and practitioners. By doing so, it reconstructs the many aspects of a collective historical agency that challenged cinema’s patriarchal structures and strategies of invisibilisation.
This first book dedicated to the history of film distribution in Brazil, starting from the creation of the film market through the supply of European films until the First World War and the arrival of US distribution agencies.
In the mid-twentieth century, cinema experienced its golden years. Never before did so many people go to the movies, were there so many cinemas, and were so many movie posters put up as they were then. This changed from the 1960s onwards when television conquered living rooms and the car invited trips and journeys. During the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, Belgian cinema culture flourished not only in cities like Brussels and Antwerp, where the film distributors and printers of film posters were located. When it came to experiencing film, Ghent was also a film city of note. What speaks most to the imagination is the enormous collection of over nine thousand, mostly Belgian, film posters from the archives of the municipal police, kept in the Ghent Archives. Rare photographs, building plans, film programs, archive documents and interviews with the moviegoers of the time complete our picture of the more than thirty cinemas that Ghent had at that time, from the luxurious movie theaters in the city center to the modest cinemas in the neighborhoods..
Through a detailed study of the circulation of European silent film in Australasia in the early twentieth century, this book challenges the historical myopia that treats Hollywood films as having always dominated global film culture. Before World War I, European silent feature films were ubiquitous in Australia and New Zealand, teaching Antipodean audiences about Continental cultures and familiarizing them with glamorous European stars, from Asta Nielsen to Emil Jannings. After the rise of Hollywood and then the shift to sound film, this history—and its implications for cross-cultural exchange—was lost. Julie K. Allen recovers that history, with its flamboyant participants, transnational currents, innovative genres, and geopolitical complications, bringing it all vividly to life. Making ground-breaking use of digitized Australian and New Zealand newspapers, the author reconstructs the distribution and exhibition of European silent films in the Antipodes, along the way incorporating compelling biographical sketches of the ambitious pioneers of the Australasian cinema industry. She reveals the complexity and competitiveness of the early cinema market, in a region with high consumer demand and low domestic production, and frames the dramatic shift to almost exclusively American cinema programming during World War I, contextualizing the rise of the art film in the 1920s in competition with mainstream Hollywood productions.
From her explosive screen debut in The Abyss (1910) through her "scandalous" fourth marriage at age 89, the Danish actress Asta Nielsen (1881-1972) was a darling of fans and the press, a global star without parallel in the silent era. So famous in Germany that she was known simply as "die Asta," during her two decades of active filmmaking Nielsen also published about her career, her impoverished childhood, her breakthrough into film, the price of fame, and her interactions with the German film industry. In 1938 Nielsen returned to Denmark, where she published her memoirs in two volumes in 1945-46, expanding on her earlier writings. This carefully crafted, colorful text offers eyewitness insights into early European film, Nielsen's star persona, and the challenges of stardom in Germany in the tumultuous period before World War II. Yet although they have appeared in multiple Danish, German, and Russian editions, the memoirs have never been published in English until now. Nielsen's work has enduring value for transnational film history, and the recent growth of interest in women's contributions to early film makes the time ripe for this translation. Julie K. Allen accompanies the text with a scholarly introduction and annotations, and a foreword by leading early film scholar Jennifer M. Bean frames the volume.
This book examines the economic circumstances in which films were produced, distributed, exhibited, and consumed during the spoken era of film production until 1970. The periodisation covers the years between the onset of sound and the demise of the phased distribution of films.
My chapter was called "The Yellow Teddybears: Exploitation as education" and looked at the way an early 1960s British exploitation film engaged with the public through attempts to position the film as a tool for education.
